Glasgow-based care provider Aspire recently joined the growing number of employee-owned businesses in Scotland, with 186 social care employees across the organisation being given a stake in the business.
Aspire provides a range of services including Self-Directed Support, Intensive/Complex Home Care, Homelessness Emergency Accommodation and Resettlement, Alcohol-Related Brain Injuries Housing Support, Care at Home, Criminal Justice and Young Care Leavers Services. Since 2011 Aspire has annually won a raft of Scottish Care National Awards.
Aspire was established in 2002 by Peter Millar, who has over 47 years’ experience in social work and community care including planning, commissioning, senior management, and developing and delivering services within Local Authorities and the NHS in Scotland. We caught up with Peter to hear more about his decision to sell the company to its staff.
“Employee ownership is wholly consistent with Aspire’s ethos and values. We are all about empowering people to achieve a better life and a more self-directed and optimistic future. Whilst that approach fundamentally underpins our work with the individuals we have the privilege of working alongside and supporting in the community, it is also highly applicable to our relationship with our employees.
Employee Ownership enables us to elevate the status of our employees, enhance their opportunities to be more involved in contributing to the growth and development of Aspire, and allows all of those employees to equitably share the benefits from Aspire’s future successes.
“Employee Ownership therefore provides Aspire with a stronger, more inclusive, collaborative and equitable model. In addition to giving all employees a real stake in the organisation, it also secures Aspire’s position as a high quality provider of social care services in Scotland and an organisation that consistently makes a positive difference to individuals’ lives and to their local communities.
“I’m delighted that Aspire Housing and Personal Development Services is in the hands of our committed and highly talented team who have been overwhelmingly positive about this important development for our organisation and are now even more enthusiastic about it. We have a superb senior management team and excellent employee trustees and staff and we are all really excited about the future.”
Some of the Aspire team
Aspire now has a Trust board which includes two elected employee trustees, Euan Jessiman and Cameron Gilchrist.
Cameron added: “On behalf of the whole team, I’d like to give a huge thanks to Peter for giving us the amazing opportunity to share the ownership of Aspire – which has such a positive impact on so many lives – and there’s something very meaningful, for both the whole team and the people we support, in becoming employee owned.”
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